On Thursday night, BuzzFeed News broke a story claiming that screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis is writing a Star Wars feature film using The Knight of the Old Republic as source material. Kalogridis has writing credits on Alita: Battle Angel and was a producer on James Cameron’s Avatar. If she is, in fact, writing a Star Wars screenplay she will be the second woman to be given public screenwriting credit for a movie (or movies) in this franchise. (Leigh Brackett wrote an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back, though Carrie Fisher, well-known Hollywood script-doctor, apparently also did uncredited rewrites for George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels.) According to the report, “Kalogridis is close to finishing the first script of a potential KOTOR trilogy, according to the three sources.” This notion seems to be corroborated by comments from Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy in April when she said: “Yes, we are developing something to look at,” when asked about a possible Knights of the Republic movie project. For those who are unfamiliar with the Knights of the Old Republic story, the most famous iteration of the story focuses on a female Jedi named Bastila Shan. Baddies like Darth Revan and Darth Malak get in on the action, too. These stories are usually set about 4,000 years before the “regular” Star Wars universe, giving everything a slightly medieval feeling. And although, the video games made this era of Star Wars famous in 2003, the Knight of the Old Republic setting is actually much older. Stories from this time period of Star Wars history were first chronicled in a comic book series which began with the title Tales of the Jedi, back in 1993. Published by Dark Horse Comics, perhaps the best of these stories features another female Jedi named Nomi Sunrider, whose Jedi Master was like a giant talking rhino thing. Really! So, if these rumors turn out to be true, and Laeta Kalogridis is writing a Star Wars film set in this time period, there’s actually a ton of material to draw from. And not all of it comes from the video games. The next Star Wars movie is The Rise of Skywalker, which will be out on December 20, 2019. After that, an untitled Star Wars movie will hit theaters in 2022, written by Game of Thrones showrunners, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.
